The worst thing about Gary Lineker’s intervention in the small boats discussion is not whether he broke BBC rules on impartiality. It’s not that he has, once again, used his privileged platform – one largely funded by us! – to spout dinner-party platitudes about the evil Tories. No, it was his political use and abuse of the crimes of history, his marshalling of the evils of Nazi Germany to score some political points against the Conservative government. It amazes me that people like Lineker cannot seem to see how immoral and even dangerous such tactics can be.
The Match of the Day host turned tiresome virtue-signaller kicked off about Suella Braverman on Twitter yesterday. In response to a video message posted by Braverman, in which she outlined the government’s new policy for halting Channel crossings by illegal immigrants, Lineker wrote:
‘Good heavens, this is beyond awful’
When confronted by another Twitter user, who told Lineker he was ‘out of order’, Lineker said:
‘This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s, and I’m out of order?’
And there it was, the kneejerk Nazi comparison, the Rik-from-The-Young-Ones gambit of essentially yelling ‘FASCIST’ at everyone you dislike or disagree with. Of course Braverman said nothing even remotely comparable to the exterminationist rhetoric used by the Nazis. As the BBC website rather coyly put it: ‘It is not clear which language in particular Lineker was referring to’.
Worse than Lineker’s aloofness is his historical illiteracy
Braverman said ‘enough is enough’ and ‘we must stop the boats’, which I’m sure were not the slogans of the Nazi regime as it launched its racist crusade of ghettoising and later murdering the Jews of Europe.
Let’s be clear: comparing a modern democracy’s entirely legal, non-violent efforts to control illegal immigration to the scientific racism and anti-Semitic barbarism of Nazi Germany is repellent. You are being more than ‘out of order’, Mr Lineker; you are minimising the crimes of history, the greatest crime in history in fact, as part of your weird urge to advertise your Tory-phobic credentials to your fellow liberals online. Trivialising the horrors of history by comparing them to perfectly normal, non-criminal policies in the present is far more offensive than anything Ms Braverman has said or done.
The usual criticisms are being fired at Lineker. ‘How many immigrants will you put up in your house, Gary?’ That kind of thing. These are well-deserved barbs. Lineker’s hostility to government efforts to get a grip on the small-boats crisis certainly suggests he is out of touch with the vast majority of Britons. No, the average Brit is not xenophobic or opposed to all immigration. They’re just concerned about the seemingly unstoppable arrival of migrants on small boats. Three hundred people illegally crossed the Channel in 2018; 45,000 came in 2022. It is entirely legitimate, compassionate even, to want to end such dangerous journeys and to re-establish sovereign control of our borders.
But worse than Lineker’s aloofness is his historical illiteracy. The modern trend for likening certain people and certain policies to Nazi Germany is out of control. It exploded in the Trump years. Leftists were forever calling Trump the New Hitler and fretting that he was turning 2010s America into 1930s Germany. We saw it in the chattering class’s meltdown over Brexit too. Brexit-style populism signals ‘a return to the 1930s’, yelped one academic. Nazi talk is now spreading into the realm of climate-change activism. Who can forget when the Archbishop of Canterbury said that the politicians who fail to find a solution to climate change would go down in history alongside ‘the politicians who ignored what was happening in Nazi Germany’. He later apologised.
And now we have immigration policies being compared to ‘Germany in the 30s’. Lineker must know that every country in the world seeks to control immigration. Are they all a bit like the Nazis, or is it just us? They all use the language of ‘controlling’ immigration and ‘stopping’ illegal immigration – is their lingo Hitleresque as well? To speak of completely unexceptional policies in the 21st century in the same breath as the barbarous events of the 1930s is wrong, wicked even, for one simple reason – it makes those historical events seem unexceptional too.
This is the terrible consequence of saying everyone I don’t like is Hitler – it relativises the evils of the past. It makes the Nazi era seem normal, mundane even, the kind of thing that happens all the time, even in the UK in 2023. If a modern home secretary saying ‘stop the boats’ is reminiscent of what happened in 1930s Germany, then some might be wrongly led to believe that maybe 1930s Germany wasn’t so bad after all. Maybe it wasn’t as uniquely malevolent as we previously thought. This is the end result of the political exploitation of the crimes of Nazism: it dulls our appreciation of just how distinctive and colossal those crimes were. Everyone needs to stop treating the history of Nazism as a political plaything, as a great debate-ender in social-media spats. Show some respect for historical truth, and for the victims of Nazi Germany.
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